Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown (PS4) Review

Soaring through Shattered Skies

Score: 8 / 10

Genre: Simulation

ESRB Rating: T (Teen)

Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown makes
you feel like the greatest pilot to ever live. Granted, most Ace Combat games conjure a similar
feeling, but Bandai Namco has gone the extra distance in the latest installment
in its classic dogfighting franchise. With some spectacular mission design and
a solid if unsurprising story, Ace Combat
7 is the combat flight simulator I’ve been waiting for over a decade.

Ace Combat 7
returns the series to the franchise’s fictional universe of Strangereal, this
time focusing on a war between Osea and Erusea that erupts following the
construction of a space elevator near the Erusean border. You play as Trigger,
a blank slate of a pilot who soon gets shipped off to a penal unit for reasons
best left unexplained. Over the course of 20 missions, you’ll fly through
diverse theatres of war as you strike back against Erusea, deal with an
onslaught of drones, and fight to end the conflict before it boils over.

The story is
primarily told in two ways, only one of which is particularly compelling.
In-between missions, there are semi-frequent cutscenes that give you the
point-of-view of characters not directly involved in the fighting, including a
talented mechanic stuck in your penal unit, a scientist creating drones for the
enemy, and the princess of Erusea. These cutscenes are dull, featuring
characters that provide little emotional weight and who do uninteresting things
that don’t truly matter until the last quarter of the game. On the opposite
spectrum are the briefings and in-flight chatter, which provide character,
levity, and most importantly made me actually invested in the events of the
war. The way your briefing officer sounds more and more tired as the war drags
on, or how your wingman Count slowly comes to respect his squadron leader do
more to make the story interesting than any pre rendered cutscene does.

You’re not going
to be surprised by the story of Ace
Combat 7, which features all the superweapons, defectors, and
under-the-radar ambushes that have become hallmarks of the series. But that’s
not necessarily a bad thing, because the franchise’s melodramatic stories are
as iconic as it’s dogfighting. At its best, Ace
Combat’s brand of melodrama strikes hard at your emotions through overt yet
well executed set pieces. At its worst, it becomes impossible to not recoil
from the barrage of awkward dialogue that attempts to convey some sort of
deeper meaning about peace or unity. Ace
Combat 7 straddles the line between those two points, being neither
particularly awkward nor particularly emotional. There’s little time to examine
issues such as drone warfare or whether it’s possible to fight a clean war
without civilian casualties, both of which the story brings up briefly before
shuffling along to the next mission.

Substantially
less awkward is the actual act of flying a plane. In each mission, you’ll fly one
of over two dozen planes that come equipped with a machine gun, a host of basic
missiles, and one of several different types of special weapons that include
missiles designed to explode when they’re near a plane, large scale unguided
bombs, and an actual railgun. Regardless of what plane you choose, flying is
simply superb, no matter if you use the simple controls that are designed for
beginners or a scheme that gives veterans greater control. The ability to
control Post Stall Maneuvers, where you can purposely stall and sharply turn
your aircraft around, adds greater depth to the usual assortment of dogfighting
maneuvers.

One of the much
touted features that’s incorporated here for the first time in Ace Combat history is the inclusion of
clouds and dynamic weather as a gameplay element. When you enter a cloud your
vision is obscured, moisture clings to your canopy, and you run the danger of
either stalling due to ice build up or crashing into obscured terrain and
aircraft. It becomes more difficult to gain a lock on an enemy target, which
conversely makes flying into a cloud a viable defensive option in a dogfight.
As simple of an addition as it is, it also creates some of the most memorable
missions I’ve played in the entire franchise. One mission tasks you with flying
back under cloud cover to avoid satellite tracking, while another conjures up a
sandstorm that significantly lowers your ability to hunt down ground targets.
Yet my favorite mission involves dogfighting in the middle of a lightning storm
in a valley, which both knocks out your on-board systems and makes it much more
difficult to fly around the mountainous pillars that reach up into the sky
around you.

Ace Combat 7’s greatest strength
lies in how well designed most of the missions are. With one major exception,
the campaign features missions that run the gamut from furballs filled with
enemy and allied planes, to a massive raid on an oil refinery, to a tight
stealth mission through a heavily guarded ravine. Yet most missions feature
changing objectives that force you to stay on your toes and prepare for the
unexpected. As an example, the aforementioned stealth mission changes into a
large scale raid partway through, and other missions will continually test your
skills as you change from offense to defense, air to ground, and vice-versa.

Outside of the
campaign, multiplayer returns in limited form with two player-versus-player
modes, Team Deathmatch and Battle Royale, the latter of which is better
described as a normal free-for-all mode. They’re both straightforward in
execution, as you take part in simple dogfights with fully customizable
aircraft at your disposal, but neither are they particularly interesting. A
co-op mode, or at least more types of PvP outside of the two modes provided
would have given me greater reason to come back and play it for more than a
handful of matches.

If you’re playing
Ace Combat 7 on the PS4, there is
also an exclusive VR mode that features three missions, an air show that you
can control, and a hangar to examine each of the aircraft up close. But just
like the multiplayer, the small number of missions and modes holds it back.
Which is a shame, because even though the visuals are scaled back, the three VR
missions are impressive and engaging in a way that rivals the best missions in
the campaign itself. As it stands however, it’s a fun sideshow that will likely
bear more fruit in future Ace Combat titles
than it does here.

As much as I wish
that the modes outside of the campaign were more fleshed out, Ace Combat 7 is a return to form for
Bandai Namco’s long running franchise. The beauty in flying, the sheer scale
and breadth to the campaign, and the small yet impactful additions to the
gameplay formula makes Ace Combat 7 feel
fresh, even if the systems behind it haven’t changed all that much over the
years. It’s high time for Ace Combat to
make its return, and fortunately, the skies are clear for it to come back
soaring further than it ever did before.

8

Ace Combat 7 marks the spectacular return of a franchise that has been gone for far too long.

A copy of the game was Publisher Supplied for this review. You can find additional information about CGMagazine’s ethics policy on our policies page.